FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT MARIA CALLAS - PAGE 3

Sometimes mothers don`t know best. Take the case of Paula Abdul, one of the hottest entertainers around. Her mother tried to discourage her from going into show biz. "My mom came from the entertainment world," Abdul says. "She worked for Billy Wilder, and she saw every aspiring actress, writer, director and producer pass through his door. She has a heart of gold, and every time someone wouldn`t get the job, she would just feel so badly for that person. There were dime-a-dozen actresses coming in and reading for roles they never got. She knew it was a hard world and that in this business, only a handful make it. So she really encouraged me to continue with school and have other options.

Maria Callas, the most renowned opera singer in the country, came to Chicago for her American debut in 1954, and Danny Newman immediately brought up her weight. It was for a publicity angle, of course. Newman, the Lyric Opera's press agent, says the 32-year-old soprano had a "sixth sense" for media relations. Callas didn't mind at all. Just before her legendary performance in "Norma," she had lost 32 pounds. "I said to her, `Miss Callas, you know, last year you were a lot heavier than you are now,' " Newman recalls.

"The Good Mother" was a very good book made into a not-so-good movie. This doesn't bother the author, Sue Miller, one bit. "The issue in selling `The Good Mother' to the movies was money exclusively," Miller says in an interview in "Listen to Their Voices: 20 Interviews With Women Who Write" (Houghton Mifflin), by Mickey Pearlman. Miller says she took the advice attributed to Ernest Hemingway: "You take your book to the California state line, you throw it over, they throw you the money, then you go back to where you came from."

Midway through Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia," there is a supercharged scene in which Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) attempts to explain to his lawyer, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), what opera means to him. As Maria Callas' recording of "La mamma morta" from Giordano's "Andrea Chenier" begins softly in the background and then swells to fill the theater, Andrew translates the words and conveys with poignant empathy the passions and emotional meanings behind this operatic excerpt.

On Sept. 16, 1620, the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, with 102 passengers bound for America. In 1630 the village of Shawmut, Mass., changed its name to Boston. In 1810 Mexicans began their revolt against Spanish rule, a day now celebrated as Mexico's Independence Day. In 1893 hundreds of thousands of settlers rushed onto a section of land between Oklahoma and Kansas known as the Cherokee Strip. In 1919 the American Legion was incorporated by an act of Congress.

There is no question that the compact disc has given the industry a tremendous incentive to invest in classical recording. The result has been a broadly diverse catalogue-from early music played on authentic instruments to the newest new music. For the collector the advantages have been as obvious as the convenience, added sonic presence and transparency, silent backgrounds and programmability of the new carrier. Now that the CD has mined most of the back catalogue of the LP era, the companies are digging ever deeper into their vaults of historical material.

"I Live for Art-Tosca" (Robert Merrill, host; Gina Cigna, Magda Olivero, Dorothy Kirsten, Licia Albanese, Zinka Milanov, Renata Tebaldi, Leonie Rysanek and others. Kultur, color, hi-fi Dolby stereo. Running time: 91 minutes. $39.95). For this 1983 program, originally produced for cable by ABC Video Enterprises and NVC Arts International, baritone Robert Merrill talks to 15 prima donnas of the opera world about the complex relationship between their public careers and private lives, about the personal sacrifices they were forced to make for their art and related matters.

Maria Callas is back with us. Nearly 20 years after the diva's death, Callas remains a cult, an image, an idea, an industry. New biographies continue to appear; EMI continues to issue compilation discs of recordings made in the 1950s, at the height of the soprano's operatic career; the few opera and concert films made of her are endlessly recycled on video and TV documentaries. The legend burns brighter in death than in life. That's particularly true in Chicago just now. In Terrence McNally's "Master Class," which runs through Feb. 16 at the Shubert Theatre, we have Faye Dunaway impersonating Callas-as-teacher in a drama inspired by the series of vocal master classes the real Callas gave at New York's Juilliard School in 1971-72.

On the darkened stage of the empty La Scala Opera House in Milan, Placido Domingo whispered a promise. "The one superstition I adhere to is to go on the empty stage of a theater after the last performance of a given run. I say `au revoir` to the stage, indicating that I`ll be back." The superstition fits a man who seems driven to attain the very things he already has--a voice that is compared to Caruso's, the style of Don Juan, an income that well exceeds $1 million a year, and a career that is endlessly matched against that of Luciano Pavarotti.